Commentary: Partitioning Syria

Friday

Aug 16, 2013 at 2:00 AM

The world still talks about Syria as if it's a single country, but some members of the Syrian opposition are beginning to discuss the reality that Syria today is effectively partitioned — complicating any negotiated solution to the conflict.

David Ignatius

The world still talks about Syria as if it's a single country, but some members of the Syrian opposition are beginning to discuss the reality that Syria today is effectively partitioned — complicating any negotiated solution to the conflict.

This frank approach was outlined in an interview last week with Samir al-Taqi, a Syrian physician who was once close to the regime but left the country two years ago and now runs his Orient Research Center, a Syria think tank, from Dubai.

Taqi offered some practical examples to illustrate the lasting effects of the conflict between the Alawite-led regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the largely Sunni opposition. It would be decades, he said, before an Alawite teacher would be comfortable giving lectures in the Sunni districts of northern Aleppo about late President Hafez al-Assad. Similarly, it would be decades before a Sunni police officer would feel safe patrolling in a Shiite or Alawite village.

What this means, says Taqi, is that any attempt to broker a diplomatic solution must begin with a cease-fire, and with combatants holding different slices of territory. The future Syria that emerges will have to be a more decentralized state, reflecting the intense feelings of communal separation and rage that have emerged over the past two years of war.

This blunt analysis is useful as the U.S. and Russia explore arrangements for a Geneva peace conference, perhaps in October, that might bring together the regime and the opposition for talks. "It may not be possible to re-establish a national convention based on a central state," warns Taqi in a recent research paper. "We need ... a state where all regions have a high percentage of decentralization." Taqi argues that as the Alawite-led regime and the Sunni opposition hunker down in the regions they control, they are turning to external powers for their political and economic lifelines.

The Assad regime depends on its patrons in Iran and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in neighboring Lebanon. The regime has focused on holding the strip of territory from Damascus to the Alawite homeland of Latakia in the northwest, relying on perhaps 100,000 regime troops and Alawite militiamen, plus Hezbollah fighters. This "Assad-istan" is, practically speaking, an extension of the Hezbollah-controlled Bekaa Valley.

The Sunni-led opposition is similarly turning to its regional patrons. Taqi notes that Syrian olive-oil producers moved their presses to Turkey. Likewise, the wheat harvest in northern Syria has gone to Turkey, while petroleum is being shipped to either Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan. Economic activity in the liberated Sunni regions of southern Syria around Daraa is now linked to Jordan. Damascus isn't the country's economic hub any longer.

What's happening in Syria isn't an insurgency now but a sectarian civil war. A triumph by either side on the battlefield is the "zero solution," says Taqi. The resolution must be political — but grounded in a realistic assessment of the difficulty in putting the pieces of Syria back together.